Open Data Hong Kong ~ Catalyst Night ~

Open Data Hong Kong is a group that was formed out of some talks at the Hong Kong Barcamp held at HK Polytechnic University this past February. A community of over a 100 people has formed quickly based first on a Google+ group and a couple of meetups with presentations and chatter on the 2nd floor of Delaney’s in Wan Chai and other gatherings around town. A Facebook page and the OpenDataHK website were setup recently. Establishing a dialogue between the users of open data in Hong Kong and the HK government is one of the goals for the group.

It’s impressive that there is so much interest in Open Data. What is it? The best resource I’ve found is the Open Data Handbook. You can listen to me go on about it here on a local public radio show recently here. The Open Data Hong Kong website has useful information on events and links to other sources on open data in and around Hong Kong that will keep growing. The Hong Kong government has had an open data initiative since 2011 called Data.One. The Hong Kong University Journalism & Media Study Centre ~ Data Journalism Lab ~ is a hotbed of activity on the data journalism side of open data in Hong Kong.

The Catalyst Night on 14 May is the kickoff for HKOpenDataMake.01, a hackathon event that will bring together developers, programmers, designers, thinkers and just the plain hangers-on to do and think about open data in Hong Kong. More than 50 people have signed up. The HK Government Office of the Chief Information Officer, Public Sector Information team will be attending the catalyst and talking about their plans for the Date.One initiative. At the Catalyst night the goal is to figure what to do over the next weekend. Teams will form and project goals will be set. Potential projects can be seen here. The teams will work, think and play around with datasets, tools and ideas and come up with results by Sunday afternoon. Presentations will be made on Sunday afternoon and Raspberry Pi prizes for the best results will be given out by Charles Mok, IT sector Legislative Council member.